Sunday, January 10, 2010

Turn Leads into Customers ... Eventually

This week I ran a successful experiment. I made money from it, and I think it's easily duplicated (by me, down the road, or by anyone with a product and a list).

To set up the discussion, you need to understand that I sell an audio book, in the parenting niche, on Clickbank. I have loads of customers, but I also have loads of "leads" ... people who signed up for my freebie audio lesson but never pulled the trigger.

You also need to know that I've gotten smarter at using my Autoresponder (I use Aweber). I used to have no customer list. Duh. Now I have a customer list where I automatically move customers onto that list, and get them off the prospect list. This way, when I want to send out a promotion, I don't bug my existing customers.

So here's what I did this week. I took a product in the fitness niche (one that I know is really good) and I recommended it through a Blog posting. I told my readers that if they buy through my link, I'll make money from their purchase, and that I'll give them a copy of my audio course for free as a bonus.

Important: I sent that blog posting ONLY to leads that were at least 60 days old, because this way I was not interfering with my affiliates, and their ability to earn a commission from leads. It is not cool to rip off your affiliates, so never EVER do this to new leads. In the case of Clickbank, the affiliate cookie lasts 60 days, so I filtered my list to include only those leads who signed up 61 days ago or more.

So to recap, the idea was to give leads a way to get my course for free, provided they bought something else.

Here's the implementation and timing.

On Wednesday I wrote up the blog post and published it. Then I emailed a short email to my leads pointing to the blog post. The blog post clearly said the deal was good until Sunday. So that gave people about 4 days to take action.

On Thursday I sent an email only to those folks who did not open my first email. This capability is available through Aweber.

On Sunday I sent a reminder email to ALL leads, saying "today is the last day to take advantage of the free offer".

What happened? I made some sales on Wednesday and Thursday. But Sunday was a much bigger day. It seems the scarcity principle really does get people to take action.

Just don't use fake scarcity. That's not cool. Scarcity must be real or you look like a real jerk (in my opinion).

1 comment:

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